Archive for June, 2010
MCTS in ASP .NET – exam 70-562
Jun 30th
Yesterday I’ve become Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in .NET Framework 3.5 ASP.NET Applications by passing the 70-562 exam!
First, I want to share with you my web development background:
- I have around 4 years of ASP .Net experience. Mainly, my experience is on .Net 1.1 and 2.0. I developed for mobile devices when there weren’t yet smart phones around us. I’ve worked on a solution that connected an Asus Palm to Nokia phones, first providing the interface, second providing the connectivity to a collection of webservices who provided encrypted and authentication for data exchanged.
- Then I’ve worked on a governmental website, creating features and maintaining it.
- Later on, I’ve managed the entire lifecycle of a website, from hosting, Windows Server / IIS maintenance to development and deployment of the website.
Let’s get to my experience in this exam…
Why .Net 3.5?
Almost all blog posts claim that the .Net 3.5 is just an extension of .Net 2.0, but when getting deeper, you realize that those developers who worked on it really produced a good quality product with many improvements and many added features over the previous version. Mainly, you’ll understand here the point of having a .Net 3.5 certification.
Comparing .Net 2.0 to 3.5 we’ll find a big difference. For example:
- ASP.NET AJAX
- New ListView and DataPager Controls
- LINQ
- WCF Support for RSS, JSON, POX and Partial Trust
- JavaScript Debugging and Intellisense
- Multi-targeting Support
.. and more on this you can read on Microsoft Official Statement.
Rhetorik und Präsentationsworkshop
Jun 18th
On 9th and 10th of June I had two days of Presentation and Retoric workshop. Our teachers were Anton Schweizer and 
Christopher Schleiden, both being Microsoft Student Senior Partners.
We were 5 students(unfortunately, one is missing from the picture), most of us Junior Students Partners. We were also preparing our first workshops. This training combined theoretical and practical knowledge, helping us in creating a better atmosphere and easier share the knowledge to our auditorium.
The workshop, who was a fully blown 2 days (on the second day we had like 10 hours). We started with a base line presentation. This was supposed to be a baseline, to understand where we need improvement and a comparison base for the presentation in the final, to see what we learned.
Workshop: Introduction to ASP .Net
Jun 15th
The next workshop of the Microsoft Student Partner in cooperation with the student body of Uni Bonn is coming!
This time is about the basics of ASP.Net and Visual Studio 2010. The workshop provides a starting point in Web programming by many practical exercises in small groups. Aim is the development of smaller Web projects, such as photo albums or guest books.
The registration is free. You can register until Thursday, the 20.01.2010 12: 00 pm by E-mail to schaller@informatik.uni-bonn.de. Space is limited by the number of available computers in the CIP pool. We have 24 fixed stations and six more places available for students with their own laptop. Please give at registration details if you will bring a laptop with Visual Studio 2010.
All participants can receive, upon request, a certificate of participation in the workshop.
Add Silverlight to WordPress
Jun 4th
As I presented earlier, you can easily create a Silverlight video player and you can see it working pretty nice. Not to mention that it can play a lot of formats and it is only 344 kb in size! Now let’s see how this is possible and how can one do it on his website.
From the start, Silverlight was meant to be as easiest as possible to develop and deploy. Also, the cross browser (running on all major browsers) and cross platform (running on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows) was a requirement. But more than this, not to depend on the server side on .Net framework was also important. So you can deploy and run (only for running you’ll need the Silverlight Runtime installed) your app no matter the OS (Operating System).
This is why we discuss today on adding Silverlight to WordPress and not on How to deploy Silverlight on Linux. From the server’s OS point of view, Silverlight is just another file so you don’t need any plugin nor installs on the server side. It is on the client side where it is downloaded, setup with parameters and processed and here you need to install the Silverlight runtime – a mere of 4 Mb. If you’ve developed prior Adobe Flash application, you’ll feel very natural on the process. So let’s begin our ride to add your Silverlight application to WordPress.
Step 1.
Develop your Silverlight application. You should have a .xap file built in order to go further.
Silverlight VideoPlayer for RailsCasts
Jun 1st
I am and will be a Microsoft Developer. While working for convenience with other tools, I love strong type languages. I don’t want to ship products because I saved once and hit “s” one more time, so my product will be shipped with that small, human and yet unpardonable error in code.
How many times did you loose your time and effort with PHP in order to find a small mistake like this?
In my pursue on Microsoft tools path I started enjoying the Silverlight technology. Who might not know, Silverlight is a competitor to Flash. By now, on its 4th version, is way above Adobe Flash in almost all areas (I actually worked with Flex and Flash recently, so I really know what I’m talking about):
- Easy to develop : the C# language is a world class, easy to write in, with good compiler, a lot of resources and a VERY good IDE (try to write code and animations in same time in that Flash IDE and you’ll see what I mean)
- Supports Full HD (there are examples on the net with 2 or 3 full HD movies playing), while Flash just tries to get HD with lots of CPU used.
- The model of development is the same for in Browser and Out of Browser – you don’t need to change the tool from Flash to Flex in order to have same product for Desktop and Web.
